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The primary prevention committee went out and spread peace at the Largo Touch a truck!!!

It started with a pretty simple idea:

Get kids to draw and color what they think peace is. Then ask them to let us display it for all to see, so that everyone sees what peace really looks like.

So we started with this:

We asked the City of Largo, FL USA to allow us to have a table at an event called Touch a Truck. This is an event where tons of people, and especially kids, come to the park and get to get in and explore tons of awesome vehicles like Firetrucks, Ambulance, Sky crane, Semi truck, Dumptruck, Garbage Truck, City bus, there was even a Helicopter that flew in.

We asked kids and adults if they wanted to color what their peaceful place looked like. A few people came over, and colored a picture, and promptly took it with them. We asked each person if they’d like to keep it or let us display it for everyone to see.

Our wall of peace started slow:

Then it began to build and more and more people started to show up. It was amazing!!!

As the kids drew, we asked them what peace looked like to them. They gave us amazingly awesome answers:

“when I’m happy”

“when there’s no hitting”

“when everyone is getting along.”

“when we are all smiling”

“when I like me”

As we asked them, we also asked the parents and they gave great answers as well.

“In the bathtub”

“relaxing on my front porch”

“when multiple generations and nationalities get together.”

There was one moment that just amazed me. There were 6 languages Russian, Arabic, Czech, Albanian, Spanish, and English all being spoken at the same time. All of the people were laughing, drawing, helping their children, and helping eachother.

Moms and dads both were helping their children. The kids were showing parents who really didn’t want to be there, that they had displayed their art on this “awesome” peace wall. They showed their relatives, their friends, and everyone they could. That was their stuff and they were helping create peace.

Everyone at the booth: Frieda, Shelba, Dawna, Prisscila, Chad, MJ, E.V, Jacob all helped everyone realize what peace was for them. We talked to them about what a healthy relationship looked like. We talked to the adults and the kids about how to create peace and nonviolence in our homes, our lives, and in our community.

More and more kids and adults gave us their pictures. They put feathers on them, they colored with markers and crayons, the glitter ran out, the stickers ran out, and there was more joy and happiness than many people have ever felt in their life.

This is what the primary prevention committee does. We come together to prevent violence, promote peace and healthy relationships, and bring that message to our community.

In the end, over 200 people were at our table talking about, seeing, feeling, and experiencing what true peace really is.

This does not include the 100’s of people that walked by the booth, saw the pictures and were compelled to comment about how wonderful this is! With this event we have affected hundreds of people!

Let’s put up an example…a scenario if you will. Let’s pretend (it’s not a far stretch) a young 10-12 year old girl is sitting with her family to watch the supwerbowl. When the following things happen, it’s acceptable and it’s normal.

An annual tradition….sexism at the superbowl. Sexism with the cheerleaders. (Yeah, they are wearing those skimpy clothes to get the fans to cheer. Really? It’s the superbowl. These are tickets people save for years to get, or do it one time in their life. This isn’t a high school game where nobody is cheering….this is the biggest football game in the US. There’s no excuse for them to be dressed like that except to show off their body parts.) Sexism with the half time show. (Do we really need to show women dancing around in lingerie and strip club gear? Does this have anything to do with entertainment…or does it have to do with showing women as mere body parts again. Plus, women are ok with it…those women are, so it must be acceptable.) Finally sexism in the commercials.

Our friends at the Date safe project have written a post on those commercials:

This young lady stood up to the Taliban so that girls would have the right to an education.

They boarded a school bus and shot her in the head.

She survived!

Now, through all of this abuse and violence that she has had to deal with in her life….she “wants to serve the people and make sure that every person has the ability to get an education.” That girls and women have the right to be free and be equal!

First, let’s talk about the name itself. “Teen Dating Violence Awareness”. This means that we are bringing awareness to teen dating violence. I think we need to change all of this….starting with the name.

Yes, we all need to be aware of teen dating violence, but why don’t we become aware of what a healthy relationship is? Why don’t we become aware of what it is to treat a person right, respectful, and generally a decent person? Why don’t we bring awareness to the healthy relationships that are actually out there? There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of great relationships out there…..where are the examples? Where are the kudos? Where are the “ata girl” “ata boy”? Instead…we become aware of the violence. Intervention groups will say, if “they” don’t know what a unhealthy relationship is they won’t be able to find that…

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Genital mutilation because women do not need to feel pleasure during sex.

Domestic Violence because a woman should know her place.

Human Trafficking because women are just there for men’s pleasure and to work.

Forced labor because that’s what women are supoose to do while the men lead them.

Forced capture because women don’t need to do anythigjn but have babies, take care of the babies, and take care of their man.

Mysogyny because women are not as good as men

Force wage discrimination because a woman does not worth as much as men.

Sexism because women are seen as mere objects, not living human beings.

Rape because women are only here for a man’s pleasure.

These are the pervasive beliefs around the world towards the female gender.

The same gender that populates more of the world by 2%.

The same gender that creates life.

The same gender that has been creating what every one of us craves since the beginning of time (no matter what else she does) – A Home.

The same gender that gets recognized on poster boards, lips, and screams every time a camera is at a sports event or in a crowd.

The same gender that has fought for equality for their entire existence.

The same gender that has uplifted every single one of us.

Why is this acceptable? It’s not!

On February 14th, world wide, billions of men and women will stand up, dance, and speak out and say in one unified voice…

NO! WE will not stand for this violence against women anymore.

Violence against women will end…NOW!

All Violence(verbal, mental, physical, sexual) against women must end!

Go to this link. One billion rising is an organization dedicated to stopping worldwide violence agasisnt women. This organization was created by Eve Ensler, a advocatre against gender violence, writer, poet, and creator of The Vagina Monologues. Do something. Learn the dance, make a video, start a march, a campaign, whatever….we must do something! Become part of the one billion rising movement.

Unless you grew up under or live under a rock, Super Bowl Sunday is likened to a national holiday and whether you celebrate it or not, you can’t help but know it’s coming. You can denounce Super Bowl Sunday all you want, but you can’t escape it. You can even go your entire life without watching one Super Bowl or attending one Super Bowl party, but you still can’t escape from it. “Back in the day,” if you didn’t want anything to do with the Super Bowl you could just watch another tv station, go out to dinner, go to a movie, or in the most extreme cases barricade yourself in your house turn out the lights and pray that the game would be a complete and utter bore so the neighbors party would end soon and everything would go back to normal. In today’s world, there is no way to escape the Super Bowl even if you want to. With social media, you will get updates whether you want them or not and even be able to watch the commercials the day after. It is a fact, that you will have friends, neighbors and co-workers who will update you with some trivial piece of information that means nothing in the bigger scope of the world.

Everyone whether they like it or not, can find something they enjoy with the Super Bowl. There are parties, alcohol, fabulous tasting homemade dips and desserts that will take a week on the treadmill just to burn off, and the hilarity of the conversations between friends supporting opposing teams. Then there is the pre-game show, the Star Spangled Banner that no one ever thinks is sung well enough, the half time show, crazy and hilarious commercials, and somewhere in there they play football. As a woman, I can keep up with the best of them when it comes to calling the game. I’m the woman at the Super Bowl party that is not serving the food or asking the stereotypical girl questions to her boyfriend, “Now tell me again, who is the team in purple?” (As she cocks her head to the right and bats her eyes). As a woman, I can make a room full of men fall silent while they are busy debating what both teams have done wrong and why they basically suck, while I say something brilliant like, “If the quarterback would just take the snap and dive to the left of the center (called a quarterback sneak), then they would get the first down.” I’m also the woman who screams and damns the referee to hell when the foot was clearly in bounds.

Here’s the thing, though. I love football, but somehow over the course of time, I’ve learned to hate it and everything it stands for. We all are aware and have been since the beginning of the sport of the male role vs. the female role presented. The women are the cheerleaders and the men play the game. No one is blind to the obvious misogyny in the commercials…just look at this year’s Go Daddy.com commercial. Everyone recognizes the obvious violence in football. (It’s a sport where people hit each other…that’s a no brainer). None of that ever really bothered me until a few years ago when we started seeing women as reporters on the sideline. Everyone hailed it as a win for women. I did not. The woman on the sidelines is always beautiful, always thin, almost always blonde, and really just reports on the most recent injuries, the coach’s irritation with his own team, and the “atmosphere” of the crowd in the stadium. The men call the game. The men sit in the booth and report the stats and the men make a lot more money. Football more so than any other sport, is the epitome of violence, misogyny, and ego. It is modern day Rome.

Here’s another thing I learned. Much further away from the stadium, somewhere in someone’s home, is a woman and a man in an unhealthy and unstable relationship. With football comes an increased level of alcohol, gambling, yelling, and increased levels of testosterone. Images of sex and violence wrap the evening in a scene of tension. As it was explained to me once, “You don’t know what it’s like to pray for a team to win, when you really could care less about the outcome, just so he won’t take it out on you if they don’t.” This isn’t about hitting, because we always seem to jump straight to the extreme. This is about using sports as a reason to tear another person down. “My team didn’t win, so the house isn’t clean enough.” (Yeah that makes sense). “My team didn’t win, so we are going to have sex to prove I’m a man.” (ummmm….o.k. like that’s going to change the outcome). “My team didn’t win and because I’m drunk, I’m going to find a reason to make this YOUR fault.” The house isn’t clean. The kids aren’t quiet. Dinner wasn’t good. You never do this, you never do that, you are always making my life miserable. For some, sports is an everything, always, and never proposition.

For some reason in this world of ours, sports is a bi-product of self-esteem. “If my team wins, then I get bragging rights for an entire year.” “If my team doesn’t win, then everything I am is worthless and always has been.” Entire communities will base their reputation on their sports team. We rally around the team and build it up. We will base our entire self-worth on the team we support. We base friendships on sports and billions of dollars dictate our mindset.

I’m not sure I’ll ever completely give up football or some of the other sports I love to watch. I can’t however, close my eyes to the vile amounts of money we spend on them while we ignore our fellow man. I can’t ignore the fact that our world could be different if our priorities shifted to the love of each other vs. the love of a sports team. I absolutely can’t ignore the fact that there are men in this world whose own self-worth is so low, that they base their entire mindset on a 20 something quarterback and a ball. Last night when the 49ers missed the two-point conversion that would have tied the game with less than 10 minutes left, I can’t help but wonder how many cuss words were hurled, walls were hit, sports artifacts were thrown, and how many women sat on the couch praying for that ball to make it into the endzone.

We all love games. But there is a degree of tolerance that we all have for say nudity and violence. Even Apple has banned apps due to nudity and violence against women. So, WHY is this app being allowed in the Apple itunes store and the Android app store for downloading?!?! Is Intimate Partner Violence only men hurting women?? Of course not!! There are many, many women who are violent to their boyfriends. And yes, this is also Intimate Partner Violence. So why are these companies allowing this as though it is okay? They will not comment. At least not yet.

The description of the game is “Crack that whip and teach your guy a thing or two about being the Perfect Boyfriend! When scolding doesn’t work, just zap him, whack him and train him to be your ideal man!” Each level has a lesson that the girlfriend will teach the boyfriend through violence. This will in turn change him to be the way that she wants him to be. What does this teach our youth? It teaches them that through violence you can change your partner, or at least try to. This is not a healthy relationship. If it were, they would respect each others differences and accept and love them for who they are.

It begins that you are instructed to slap the boyfriend every time he looks at another girl, leaving a big red welt on his face every time she slaps it. You have to abuse the boyfriend in order to move on to the next level.

Lesson two is not only abusive but sexist as well. It insinuates that females are supposed to clean up after males. However, if this boyfriend doesn’t clean up after himself, he will get tasered. It goes on to teach the boyfriend not to drink your drink, turn up the radio, flex his muscles with girls around, ignore you, fall asleep at a movie, speed, play around when they should be doing chores and to stay with and near you when you shop for clothes. All of these are punishable by physical abuse: getting hit on the head with a tennis racket, getting a shovel of sand in the face, having weights dropped on his foot, getting maced at the Prom with friends looking on and laughing, and getting strangled by a leash in the car, at which one point he struggles back! After each level, you receive encouragement. At the end of ten horrifying scenes of violence, you are finally “rewarded’ with the “Perfect Boyfriend”, the “Ideal Mate”, who is not really himself at all!

Personally, I am surprised that we are just now hearing about this since it has been out there for at least a few months now. Then again, I am not so surprised, because violence against men aren’t taken as seriously as against women. We need to strip away our gender stereotypes and realize that we are all just people and ANYONE can get hurt and controlled…BY ANYONE!! They don’t have to be six foot five and three hundred pounds to be considered a believable abuser! People are savvy in the way in which they gain their control. So, whether it’s men against women, women against men, men against men or women against women… Intimate Partner Violence is all about violence between people who are intimate, no matter what their gender.

So, let’s click onto Games2win or their supporters out there, Apple and Android, and let them know what we really think of this app! It’s abusive, demeaning and a terrible game for their target audience (or any audience)…ages 4 and up!!! What kind of example would this be for a four year old! Their little personalities are still forming!

(Caution!!!! These are ads that are deemed “sexy” therefore you will see gratuitous focus on women’s bodies. Click at your own risk. However, all of these ads were on TV at one point or another during 2012. )

There is a very good reason I put this link here. We experience the world through our senses. Eyes and ears play a very big role in this experience. Through the eyes and the ears we get over 60% of all stimuli needed to experience our reality. Feelings can be created with a combination of using our eyes, ears, and brain – the brain will then create a visceral feeling we can actually feel on our skin. Taste and smell are so interrelated that they are often left off this spectrum, but that’s ok because in many experiences they are only 30% of our sensations – and the brain does wonders filling that part in too.

But wait…if we are experiencing our lives through these mediums, that means TV and ads actually create and develop the way we see the world. BINGO!!!

(BTW – Scent is intricate in creating a relationship…but we are being taught to bypass that for visual. It has been found that if we bypass our sense of smell when it comes to a relationship – we have very little basis for that relationship other than physical.)

Since this is true – The advertising agencies are selling us a “reality” that is simply not a reality. However, they are engaging our entire brain to make sure we see it as reality. This is fine and dandy when you know it….

BUT MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW IT!

Therefore, you have people looking at these ads, porn, and TV shows that all show women as mindless bodies walking around wanting only us. Then men are taught that these mindless bodies is what they are suppose to want. They go out in search of these mindless bodies (hence the cat calling, and street harassment – see it’s ok, because women aren’t real people, (yep you guessed it) they are just mindless bodies) and then are disappointed when these mindless bodies speak.

However, when the speaking happens…advertisement, TV, and movies are here to save the day again. They have taught men that it’s ok not to listen, just as long as you say the right thing to be able to touch more of the bodies you’ve been taught to lust after.

In the end, it becomes very frustrating that everything we see says we should be able to have and should want the mindless bodies….but they all have minds.

However, male privileged has taught us that we don’t have to listen to this nonsense…we can use power and control to create fear, and then the mindless bodies will act right.

Then we have domestic violence!

Is this jump too radical…not according to the brain science that we are unearthing on a daily basis. This is a culmination of data from the likes of great speakers such as Jean Kilbourne – creator of the Killing Us softly videos, and her multiple books about the perception of women and how that perception creates violence. There is also the Media Literacy Campaign that shows time and time again how the media creates views and ideas of our own reality that is often not a reality it all.

So what do we do? Contact each and every one of these businesses that ok’d these advertisements and say…NO! This is not ok!

I was visiting a friend of mine in an “Assisted Living Facility”. She is an able-bodied woman who can do a lot of things, but she is forgetful and her 2 strokes have left her footing not what it use to be. After the 6th fall – she decided she needed some help.

well, as I was there she was showing me all the awesome things that were around the complex. She also showed me the bus schedule to EVERY cool place anyone of the 70+ age range would want to go. We eventually ended up at the shuffle boards, it seems the whole place eventually gravitates to this area during sundown. It also helps that the shuffle board area looks out at the Gulf of Mexico…a great place to hang out and watch the sun go down over the water.

One of her friends, Glady, asked me what I did for a living. I explained that I educated people about preventing domestic violence.

Her eyes grew twice their size, then slowly dropped to their normal volume. She sighed and went back to watching the sun. A few minutes later, she touched my arm again and asked what the statistics were now. I explained they were 1 in 4 women would be a victim and 1 in 9 of men would be a victim. She sighed again.

Just as the sun peeped out of existence and people started to wander home, she patted me on the shoulder. She smiled and told me this story written down the best I can remember:

When I was a young gal I helped battered women…my mom as the first person I helped. I told my grandpa what was happening. Grandpa came over with a shotgun, there was a struggle and the next day mom and I patched three holes in the hallway. However, dad was never seen again and mom smiled a lot more. When I was 19 i got a job as a secretary for a hospital. A woman came in with a split lip that needed 5 stitches from a fly ball. This was 1951, there weren’t many women out playing ball those days. She sat down and told me her tale of abuse – I was flabbergasted this happened to more people than just my mom. I told her to call her dad…he’d do something. But she was fatherless. The nurse sewed her up, and she left.

In 1961 I became the first victim advocate, and I opened my house to any woman who needed help. My husband helped, and we built an add on that looked like barracks for people to live. He and I got weapons permits and weapons to match…those men didn’t come around after some buckshot went over their head. Then I got on the women’s lib bandwagon…I even have some of my old buttons. That was the day…we were really doing something.

Now, I hear that this is still going on and the stats are even worse. How sad is that! Then she raised her voice: How long do we have to fight this________ ________ ____________ abuse? (You can fill in the cuss words) I worked to end abuse and maintain women’s rights for decades, and my husband died still at his desk at a women’s shelter as I did an intake form. Up and had a heart attack right then and there.

How long does this have to go on?

When I got done listening to her, I was amazed! her question was very heart-felt and a question I have to ask many many times.

In Pinellas County, there are two women who are directors of Domestic Violence centers. they have both spent their years fighting for the rights of women and fighting to keep their centers open. They have held victims hands as the blood ran from their face. they have stood next to victims as their abuser yells and glares at them in a court room. they have lobbied congress, the senate, and the state. They have enacted laws, legislation, and movements that are remembered and used to this day. They, like Glady, were on the lines when women’s rights and VAWA were being decided and discussed. they have made money, they have given money, they have given their voice, and their lives to end domestic violence once and for all.

Both of these ladies began their career working to help victims, create gender equality, and end domestic violence. Now, both of them are close to retirement age, and we are still working towards the same end that Glady was working towards so many years before them.

How long does this have to go on?

How many children have to be taught to act like this?

How many homes must be destroyed?

The real question – How will we, the next generation, change this status quo?